1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of data backup and archival tools and more particularly to data fragment dispersal about a computer communications network for data backup and archiving.
2. Description of the Related Art
The advent of personal computing revolutionized both the collection and generation of data in the personal and industrial environments. Prior to the widespread adoption of computing, data collection meant paper—lots of it. Data archival and retrieval referred to nothing more than the filing of paper in a filing cabinet indexed for relative ease of retrieval. As the volume of data grew, so too did the physical space requirements for filing cabinets. Data archives of more significant volume necessarily involved microfiche—photographs of data in order to reduce the physical space requirements of filing cabinets. Thus, the evolution of electronic data collection and storage literally saved the world from filing cabinet overpopulation.
The replacement of physical paper with electronic data, however, produced its own set of critical issues. First and foremost, data security remains of paramount importance. That is to say, since unlimited copies of data can be generated with the stroke of a key on a keyboard, it is imperative that only authorized individuals can access electronic data. Further, without data backup no one would rely upon electronic data lest a minor electro-mechanical malfunction of a disk drive result in the loss of critical information. Accordingly, two separate industries focused respectively upon data security and data backup and archival tools arose.
Traditional data backup and archival tools rely upon the principal of redundancy in placing copies of important data in different places so that a malfunction in one data storage medium is of minimal consequence. Advanced data backup and archival tools not only perform periodic backup operations, but also live backup operations in real time with the concurrent writing of data to multiple disk media. Of course, sophisticated data backup and archival tools also implement different degrees of data encryption and access control to effectuate correspondingly different level of data security.
Traditional data backup and archival tools can be expensive not only in the direct cost of software licensing, but also in respect to indirect costs like the establishment and maintenance of server farms supporting data backup and retrieval operations. Consequently, many users opt to outsource data backup and archiving to third party vendors who bear the burden of the expense of maintaining proper infrastructure. Engaging an outsourced provider of data backup and archival services, however, still can be very expensive and requires end users to acquire a certain degree of trust in the reliability and longevity of the provider. In particular, end users often lack the confidence that an outside vendor can maintain the security and confidentiality of data archived in storage controlled by the vendor.
Recognizing the difficulty of trusting third party vendors to perform data back and archival services, data backup and archival tools have been developed to disperse different files across many different servers such that the entirety of a data backup set is not entrusted within a single storage medium. As such, obtaining access to a given storage medium cannot result in corresponding access to the entire backup set. Even further, by utilizing existing servers in trusted server farms, a third party vendor providing this type of distributed data backup and archival service need not incur enormous infrastructure maintenance expense. Rather, the third party vendor need only maintain an index of where different files in a backup set can be located amongst a distributed grouping of servers. Even still, in as much as portions of the backup data set statically reside in the same location over time, data security remains partly exposed to compromise.